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First Look at Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes a first look at Microsoft's Exchange Server 2010 Beta, noting several usability, reliability, and compliance improvements over Exchange 2007. Top among Exchange 2010's new features are OWA support for Firefox 3 and Safari 3; improved storage reliability; conversation views; mail federation between trusted companies; and MailTips, a sort of Google Mail Goggles for the corporate environment. 'Database availability groups give you redundant mail stores with continuous replication; database-level failover gives you automatic recovery. I/O optimizations make Exchange less "bursty" and better suited to desktop-class SATA drives; JBOD support lets you concatenate disks rather than stripe them into a redundant array.' Exchange 2010 will, however, require shops to upgrade to Windows Server 2008, as support for Windows Server 2003 has been dropped. Microsoft will release technical previews of other products in the suite, including Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010, in the third calendar quarter."
The invoice for this baby is pretty small compared to your normal MS Exchange Server, it's only 1. But that's not in dollars, that's in first born children. So I'm going to throw out a few strategies for coping with this.
So, like pretending you're a college student, starving African or university staff to get cheap editions of Exchange 2007, there are ways to acquired 2010 at a relatively low cost and I hope this helps you cope with the extreme cost of owning Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for your enterprise business.
... but that's just the unspoken rule.
Sure the costs don't stop there, you need to upgrade to Windows Server 2008 to use it and there are a few more things you'll need to upgrade if you want to keep the same functionality you have now
My work here is dung.
Nope.
MSFT is still retarded that way.
i would KILL to be able to data-mine the email in the company with a SQL script.
"here you are sir, 23 people in the office are boinking your Executive assistant."
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
there are these entities called corporations/companies. they are required to follow a lot of laws and in some cases retain all communications for many years. Exchange makes this easy because it centralizes everything for easier management.
2010 looks more like 2007 R2. Same engine but more features and support for it's new ActiveSync partners, Google and Apple.
the archiving and legal features look nice. right now you have to buy add on products from EMC and other companies. Integrating the SOX features into Exchange will save customers a lot of money.
Yeah, but you're not a large corporation. Exchange does all kinds of crazy shit that's nice to have in a very large environment. Calendaring, extreme scalability, integration with other systems, mobile messaging integration, spam filtering, encryption support, voicemail integration, auditing compliance. etc... and etc... and etc...
Exchange does a _whole_ lot of shit and integrates with other products that do a whole lot of other shit.
So if you have 50 employees and 40 computers, Exchange might be overkill. If you have 40,000 employees, it might be exactly what you need.
I've never used Microsoft Exchange Server in my life. Mostly because I'm more from a hippy FOSS type company.
Having read the Microsoft marketing crap, then the wikipedia article for a more neutral POV, I don't get it.
What is special about "electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage."
I often hear exchange server quoted as THE reason why some companies can't diversify their software from Microsoft, but that lot doesn't sound too compelling to me.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa142634(EXCHG.65).aspx
it isn't exactly normal SQL but it is alot closer than most things - and it does work.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Because most companies dont want to hire competent EMail admins. Any of the MCSE monkeys can administer the Exchange server. No they cant administer it correctly but they can administer it. You really do need a competent email admin staoff to use exchange, but it's not as daunting as the FOSS or other options out there to windows It staff.
I also dont understand the love affair with outlook, It's simply that some PHB's hate change and they used Exchange as the killing point to stop OSS infiltration.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
People underestimate how important Exchange is.
The argument is always how Office is the real lynchpin and that if only a compatible document suite like Google docs or OpenOffice got a foothold Microsoft would be crushed but Outlook/Exchange is the REAL barrier to entry.
I work at a call center. EVERY corporate employee who calls me is using Outlook except the 1% of poor souls stuck with Lotus Notes and Domino.
Business relies on Outlook/Exchange.
Wow, it's kind of hard to believe, but there's actually something in this update that sounds like it'd be helpful. I think it's the first update to a Microsoft product in... I don't know... about 8-9 years where the update actually offers me something new that would actually be useful for me.
For those who don't already know, the webmail that is built in to Exchange is actually fairly good, and is one of the early web applications to actually use something like AJAX to give you the feeling of using a desktop application. The only problem is that it has only ever really supported IE, and if you use any other browser, it reverted to a crappy version which was... ok. Not really very good, but yes, it worked.
Anyway, it's possible that I may consider buying an upgrade someday!
Frankly, nearly every option I have ever heard containing the phrase "with Windows Server" has been a terrible idea.
if you have an iphone or winmo you can point your phone to a corporate email server and it will download all your email into the phone as long as you have a signal. and the IT department can manage all the phones remotely.
say your hippy marketing exec loses his or her iphone and it has all kinds of data on it. the IT people can just wipe it remotely not caring where it is.
say you have to keep all email for at least 7 years but you don't want it in anyone's mailbox. right now you have to buy a third party product. Exchange 2010 integrates it.
say you want failover to another city with all your company's email there. Exchange 2007 and later.
Even the FOSS Exhcange clones don't come close. For a medium to large business it's cheaper to buy Exchange with all the features than pay for add on software and more people to admin it
"here you are sir, 23 people in the office are boinking your Executive assistant."
"Don't worry - I've already told the cleaners to give special attention to your desk, chair, phone, scanner, shredder, and your little wooden dinosaur sculptures with the very long necks."
which is totally what she said
Am I missing something, or has Exchange started to gobble up OS functions now?
You must be new to Microsoft products.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Exchange works with any IMAP email client, but the email admins need to manually enable IMAP on the Exchange server. The question I ask is, "Will Thunderbird 4 or SeaMonkey 3 support Exchange's default MAPI protocol?" That way, Mozilla email clients can work with any Exchange server. Then individual users can easily migrate away from Outlook without the prior consent of the email admins.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
You can setup rules for phone calls. Freaking awesome.
if (Status == b0rking_hot_secretary)
{
if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.wife.phonenumber)
call.redirect("/dev/null");
else if (caller.phonenumber == contacts.otherHotSecretary.phoneumber)
Send3WayInvite(caller);
}
But in all seriousness, it'll be nice to have a rule that auto-directs calls to my cell when I'm out of the office.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
support for mobile .. access
Bingo. This is the reason that we haven't moved away from Exchange. Windows Mobile connected to Exchange with DirectPUSH is a great combination for mobile users.. you can synchronise all your contacts, calendar, tasks and email with Exchange remotely. Email actually arrives on the mobiles a second or two before showing up in Outlook. Our Exchange server would be replaceable if it weren't for this. I almost replaced it with OpenExchange until I found out about this feature, which has now become essential to a lot of our sales team. If the blackberry network (and devices) weren't so shit then maybe I'd reconsider (the number of times I used to have our blackberry users blaming me for email not working when in fact it was the blackberry network, something which I have no control over.. eurghh..). There is a lot of room for a nice FOSS email client/server product on an open mobile platform..
which is totally what she said
Just enable IMAP support on the Exchange server, and it will work with any IMAP email client.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Perhaps IMAP was not enabled in that Exchange setup...it definitely works, though.
However, to answer your original problem (Firefox and HTML mail), Exchange 2010 does support Firefox (and Safari) using all the features of OWA that IE does, including HTML mail compose.
Exchange has had support for mailbox journaling for a while now. It's not a new feature. Maybe in 2010, they just prettied up the process.
I'm fairly sure OpenGroupware.org (or, SOGO, at least) supports everything you've described, and does so via open protocols like CalDAV, IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, and so on.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You misread... That's for the REPLICATED copy. i.e. You keep your live database on RAID 1/0, but you keep the realtime replicated copy on JBOD. With EXCH 2007 microsoft began (for very good reasons) recomending DAS instead of SAN (due to application and database high availablility features of Exchange 2007). Now, half of your DAS modular array units don't require expensive controllers, further reducing your costs without detracting from availability. Since the server fron end no longer needs to be a microsoft Cluster as well, Enterprise Server is no longer a requirement either.
We recently deployed a 20K user solution under Exch2007. We lobied for a modular extensible DAS storage solution, but instead upper management insisted on big iron SAN chassis (2 of them). We spent $450K on disks where we could have spent less than 100K and had the same performance and reliability simply because upper management (and apparently you) have not read or do not understand the new database architecture proposed in Exchange 2007. 2010 improves upon that by removing some server side hurdles while maintaining the same data reliablity.
You're keeping 2-3 local, active, asynchronously replicated (with real time log rollback) copies of your exchange system, with 30 second or less automatic failover that does not disconnect users in the process. Why keep them all on RAID 10 if you can simply fail from one over to the other? The only reason to keep any 1 of them on RAID 10 is simply to keep from failing over the first time! (and you'll recover and be back on the RAID 10 in 24-48 hours and you still have redundancy in log shipping, offsite server replication, and traditional backups to supplement that, all without clusters!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
His first point is you can use it with FF and Safari. Nice, but not a really big deal to most admins.
For sysadmins who want their users to stick with Firefox or something else not named Internet Explorer, an improvement to OWA may not be a huge deal but it's still nice. OWA on alternative browsers blows pretty hard. It works, but it blows.
Yea, it would be REALLY NICE if MSFT would put Exchange inside of something other than a Jet engine database... Then maybe I could have a high performance database that wasn't capped at 200GB for performance reasons, and I could have one big database per server cluster instead of 12-16... and I could front end that with a half a dozen exchange servers and have all 20,000 users inside of a single database and eliminate all the wasted space from single indexing!
For Chrsits sake, can't the Exchange people and the SQL people work together, and combine the log shipping asynchronous non-cluster replciation features of exchange with a REAL F*ING DATABASE ENGINE!?!?!?!
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
This kind of misses the point. In many cases of Microsoft products, you could weave and configure together a bunch of FOSS applications to do the same thing. But then you'd have a custom solution that only your now-very-valuable admin understands. On the other hand, Exchange is a one stop shop for all this stuff, and the admins are pretty much interchangeable, since the product is the same.
Mail servers for large corporations are not just, well, mail servers. For a 200 person shop, full Exchange is definitely overkill (which is why there's multiple versions you can buy). For a 300K person company, it worth the cost.
I agree with your point, but must say that your abrasive tone makes this AC understand why IT folks get such a bad rap. It's similar to why people dislike police so much. I consider myself a "competent" e-mail admin, but the several Exchange servers I administer only constitute about 3% of the servers I am responsible for, so I don't really have time to focus on them as much as I would like.
I was able to set up a working Exchange 2007 server in 2 days. I had never configured an e-mail server before. I'm not even an MCSA (well MCTS woudl be the new name for it)....really only about halfway to it.
So it's even easier than you say it is :-) But you are absolutely correct...you need a competent admin to do it right (I know I sure as hell didn't do it right...it was just a test box)...they don't necessarily have to be an "E-mail Admin" to do it right, they just need to be competent enough to follow best practice guidelines (and obviously have a basic understanding of how e-mail works...any of your 'MCSE monkeys' should have that).
And that is a big part of why Exchange predominates...it's easily administered, and it has features that nothing else offers on an equivalent level.
Also keep in mind that it's not just the PHB's being resistant to change that stops OSS...it's the fact that Microsoft does a good job of making sure that their stuff integrates with eachother very well (and they don't exactly go out of their way to make sure other stuff can integrate with their products). The reason Exchange was so easy to get up and running for me is due in large part to Active Directory integration, and ISA Server 2006 is basically preconfigured to allow an Exchange server the proper access just by telling it the IP address.
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Honestly. The adoption rate of Exchange 2007 was LOW and slow. Even when SP1 was released (after almost a year delay, btw), we're still stuck with this shitty command line interface that USED to be GUI to do all sorts of fun admin things in. It's a royal PITA to administer. How about an SP2 that will fix seemingly dead issues like OWA support for other browsers, etc? If MS thinks we and other companies that just spent thousands of dollars on the "bleeding edge" 2007 are going to pony up for 2010, they've got a surprise waiting. This is incrtedibly insulting.
I guess Ballmer realized how shitty everything was the company has done over the past 2-3 years since he took over and decided to move on.
What is special about "electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks; support for mobile and web-based access to information; and support for data storage."
Not having to run a dozen different, barely interoperable end-user applications to achieve it.
Who is modding this guy up?
IMAP is enabled on ALL MAILBOXES in Exchange 2007 by default. You just have to configure a few settings and enable the service. You can also disable IMAP globally.
To answer your previous assertion that Thunderbird doesn't work - you're wrong again. Our user base uses Thunderbird extensively. Like many universities, we used to push Eudora, waaaay back before we moved to Exchange 5.5, and a lot of professors liked Eudora enough that they will never use Outlook. Thunderbird is the most suitable replacement for Eudora that we've been able to identify. It works great with or without SSL encryption, using POP or IMAP.
So seriously, you very obviously don't have a clue. Please stop with the misinformation.
Exchange database engine is also called "Jet", but it's a different kind of Jet: Access is Jet Red, Exchange is Jet Blue. The difference is explained here.
I think you've muddled the MAPI client and MAPI protocol together, so i'll clarify for you: MAPI as a client access method (ie the MAPI protocol) is built-in, and turned on by default. For Outlook clients who are on the same network as your Mailbox server(s), this is the default connection method. The MAPI client bits, however, are not included in Exchange server anymore. Really the only thing that i've found that this affects is the ability to export mail to a PST when working directly on a mailbox server. It's been replaced by a number of powershell commands (export-mailbox, import-mailbox), and can still be done on workstations with Outlook installed (because the MAPI client bits are part of Outlook).
Sorry, but really, you're wrong. I'd love to believe you, because then we could all just drop Exchange and everything would be good. What you're saying may contribute to Exchange's place in the corporate world, but it's not the complete answer.
But show me another email package that provides all the same things. Integrated email, contacts, calendar, the ability to send/receive meeting invites, role delegation, public folders, support for mobile devices (w/push and remote wipe), single sign-on, advanced AJAX web client as well as desktop client... I'm missing some things. Those are just the major features off the top of my head.
Oh, right, you're going to tell me about Zimbra and Scalix, except those don't seem to work as well as FOSS people claim, and besides not all of the components are FOSS. Or you're going to post something about some package that no one has ever heard of, but you'll swear it's great. When I investigate, it'll turn out to be some not-really FOSS package that doesn't work at all and has only been in development for 2 months. Or you'll tell me, "I don't care about your features," in which case, great, that's why you can use a FOSS alternative and the rest of us can't.
Sorry, I need a trustworthy and functioning alternative from a major vendor (who I can safely assume will exist in 2 years). Maybe Apple will be a contender once Snow Leopard comes out, but your IMAP/POP3 server isn't really in the same class of product.
Business people have funny ideas. In my experience they want everything integrated and everyone using the same software. They think it's cool that someone that mailed once 6 months ago is in their address book.
I might be too far along the "Dark Side" (TM)... but why exactly is that a bad idea? I think it's a nifty feature, myself.
I'm under instruction to produce some stationary for outlook because the CFO wants a logo in his emails. I've explained to him that it's stupid. I've shown him base64 encoded binary attachments on the mail spool. I explained the increase in message size and storage requirements for sent email. Futile. Like the bit in American Psyhco where they're all flashing business cards, his peer group are impressed by recieving email with a company logo.
Are you stupid yourself??? Why would your CFO care about how many bytes an encoded binary attachment takes, or how it looks in base64 of all things !!! Just tell him "Yes sir, it will cost U$ XXXX in added storage costs, do you still want to go ahead sir?", that's all he wants to understand or care about.
Much like some of us don't care how exactly your car works as long as it takes you there (even though it's not a bad idea to know a bit), your CFO doesn't want to or cares to know how his logo goes.
Even further, if he thinks a company logo on his emails will result in more business opportunities, I think he's right to implement that. YOU are not the target of those logoed emails, it's other people like him !!!
/anti-rant + rant (sorry for the flamebaitish name-calling)
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
A philosophical question, then: what's coming first - Exchange running in Emacs, or Emacs running in Exchange?
My money would be on Emacs running a virtual machine on which you could install Exchange.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
The problem with Microsoft products is that everybody can set it up, but almost no-one that does that knows how to configure it the right way. Defaults? Rofl...
Here be signatures
Not only the pricing, but this part is intriguing too:
Outlook protection rules
Automatically triggers Outlook to apply an RMS template to a message before it is sent
I suppose that means that a GPL V3 notice is attached whenever it notices that a user is attempting to email source code.
Take that! you GNU/Linux weenies!
Yes, with Calendar Server you can enter appointments somewhere and it will automatically update on every device you got connected to the calendar. There are also implementations that keep Calendars in IMAP folders although you would have to use the same (or at least compatible) software on desktop and mobile devices.
You can get push e-mail with IMAP, it's called IMAP IDLE. A lot of "push" services work in a similar way. Somehow the connection is kept open and the server sends a small packet when there's new mail. Bandwidth usage is minimal and implementation cheap and simple. I wouldn't be surprised if Exchange uses the same protocol but somehow encapsulates it into a proprietary layer (like they do with Kerberos and LDAP for AD)
Windows SBS is not the same as a dedicated Exchange box. Although the implementation depends largely on the administrator I think. Either way it can be done, Ubuntu doesn't have to pay CAL's though.
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